


Asylum

by KathrynShadow



Category: Batman - All Media Types
Genre: Abandonment Issues, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Emotional/Psychological Abuse, Gen, Harley Quinn is Robin, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, that's it that's the concept, the Suicide Squad is mentioned but only in a 'wow I really don't like this' context, will get a little dark but there's a bat signal at the end of the tunnel
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-03-05
Updated: 2018-09-30
Packaged: 2019-03-27 07:16:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 7,132
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13875894
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/KathrynShadow/pseuds/KathrynShadow
Summary: It’s a stupid thought, only pulling itself into being because she starts instinctively scanning the sky for wings, the clouds for the light of the Signal:the Bats would never forget one of theirs so quick.--What timeline is this? Don't know. What universe is this? No idea! This has been haphazardly duct-taped together from basically every single piece of Batman-related media I've ever absorbed, because if I tried to get too precise with timelines and stuff... all I'd be doing is research and I'd never write this. I apologize for the construction dust.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> first, a fair warning: I resent the Suicide Squad as a concept (partly because I'm madly in love with Secret Six and it just... isn't that) and Harley's inclusion in it in particular (hey, I have a great idea! let's take this character who finally escaped from decades of being bossed around, abused, and used alternately as a tool or as cannon fodder... and instead jam her into a situation where she's being bossed around, abused, and used alternately as a tool or as cannon fodder except now she will literally be blown up if she starts trying to get out! THAT'S JUST GREAT, THAT'S LOVELY) so there will be no Squad positivity in this. at all. like maybe for the individual members that I both recognize and care about but I hate the overall concept so they're definitely going to be the villains in this one. if you do like them... not judging you, but just letting you know that I REALLY don't, and the people in charge are going to be blatantly used to move the plot along and be generally awful human beings.
> 
> Aaalso, I'm sure y'all have noticed that there's a conspicuous lack of shipping in the tags for this one. This is mostly because Dick may or may not even be necessary in this arc (it's a little nebulous) and I don't want to shoehorn him in when it doesn't make sense. If the ship doesn't show up in this one, it will in the next one (because this somehow grew out of control before I even started writing it). And also I have another multi-chapter WIP in the works that is pairing-centric as an apology if my previous Harley-related fics are the only reason you came here. (I have a prologue, but not a title. Rip.)

Robin vanishes from Gotham again and Harley doesn’t think anything of it at first. Honestly, between the dying thing (which,  _ wow, _ she feels for the poor kid; as much as she doesn’t like comparing the Joker positively to anything or anybody, at least he killed a teenager and not a  _ ten-year-old child, _ and at least he wasn’t working directly for Red Hood’s mother,  _ geez _ ) and the wandering-off-to-right-international-wrongs-or-whatever thing (she’s a little hazy on the details there; she mostly just gets superhero gossip from neighboring-ish cities, not halfway around the freakin’ planet), he just sorta seems to do that.

But he’s gone for… a while. He’s not dead, she knows that much—partly because sometimes she hears rumors that he’s cropped up in Siberia or something and they’re just a little too cohesive and not contradictory enough to be people making Robin a fun new cryptid, partly because he’s still doing the Teen Titans thing from what she can tell, and of course partly because Batman hasn’t gone batshit and charged headlong off the rails again. (She hadn’t been anywhere near Gotham and she still maybe kinda sorta boarded up some windows and hid in a corner until she heard he’d left the country. She didn’t have anything to do with the kid’s murder, but Bats didn’t really seem to be firing on all cylinders at the time, sooo…)

About eight months into him not being home, someone gets a decent picture of him (or as decent as it’s possible to get when Starfire’s hair is doing its weird shiny business and obscuring a third of her teammates), and he’s changed his outfit. Harley doesn’t think much of that either. So he’s graduated from Robin school; neat. Nobody’s ever done  _ that _ before.

Nothing comes of any of this. Not until she’s sent out with the Squad again, and spacetime goes to absolute shit, and by the time she comes back two hours later it’s actually been a little over a year, and everything of hers is just… gone.

(Somebody else is living in her apartment. The gang’s disintegrated, her pets scattered between the individual members. One of them is an accountant now. The woman who ended up with her Dachshund is in a band and they’re on freakin’ tour. She hears “we all thought you were dead” from at least five different people and what the hell universe do they think they’re living in where that would mean she’d never come back?)

She can only lose everything so many times. And yeah, she could get everybody back together… or mostly everybody… but it wouldn’t be the same because now she knows that they’d just  _ left _ the first time. She’d never been gone that long before but she’d been gone, and they knew it was super secret government agent crap, and they  _ knew _ and they  _ left anyway _ and she’s rifling through her third Goodwill in the area before it occurs to her that she’ll never find all of her stuff. She’ll probably never even find  _ most _ of her stuff.

She hides under a particle board desk covered in half-peeled horse stickers and she has a nice, long, awkward, ugly, semi-loud crying jag. Two separate people show up to ask her to leave; the first chickens out when she redoubles her efforts. The second one offers her a tissue, which initially makes the problem worse, but she’s kind of cute and Harley just doesn’t really have the energy to carry on much longer anyway.

She doesn’t exactly  _ leave,  _ though. She does go outside, but then she just jumps on the fire escape of the building next door, climbs up to the roof, and perches on the edge.

So. Homelessness: not exactly super new to her. Also not the biggest problem it could be, because it’s not like anybody drained her bank account while she was MIA (and if they did, they are so far beyond dead that they’re gonna have to think of a whole new word for it). Cash makes her less antsy, but it’s also a little easier to make off with especially when  _ her apartment isn’t her freakin’ apartment anymore, _ so chalk that one up as a point to paranoia.

Still not great.

Harley sighs heavily and leans back, looking up at the sky. It’s pretty cloudy tonight and the sun is starting to think about setting, so it’s already fairly dark. There wouldn’t even be much of anything to look at if it were a totally clear night, not with all the light pollution, but she watches it anyway.

It’s a stupid thought, only pulling itself into being because she starts instinctively scanning the sky for wings, the clouds for the light of the Signal:  _ the Bats would never forget one of theirs so quick. _

And then it’s a stupid idea, one of those weird little what-ifs that flits across her brain when she’s going to sleep, or that gets its hooks in her after she drops off and confuses the hell out of her the second she wakes up:  _ so what if I tried to join up? _

There isn’t a Robin right now, not really. She has to start her whole life from scratch again, anyway. Batman’s favorite hobby is picking up strays—okay, sure, she’s more than a decade older than the average age of new birdlets, but it’s not like he refuses to team up with anybody old enough to vote or anything.

(If it weren’t for the dumbass Explodey Head Platoon, she’d still have the life she’d pieced together for herself. She got out once and it hadn’t stuck, but… If anyone could extricate her from Waller in a way that wouldn’t end with her being hunted down and dragged back, it’s Batman.)

The back of her neck itches.

The worst that could happen is him saying no, right?

\--

Harley arrives in Gotham with a backpack and not much else, and it kind of feels like coming home. Okay, yeah, the absolute worst things that have ever happened to her happened inside this city, but… but damn it, she just wouldn’t be  _ her _ without it. She kind of owes it, in a way.

There are tiny gargoyles on the pillars on either side of the sidewalk heading out of the station. It would take too much effort not to hug them, so she doesn’t. It nets her a couple of weird looks, but not nearly as many as it would if she hadn’t put on some normal clothes for the trip.

Probably wouldn’t be a good idea to draw attention to herself as… well,  _ herself _ before she gets a chance to talk to Bats one-on-one. He’s got some not so great memories about her normal gear, even if she’s redesigned it a bunch of times since she was wandering around Gotham on a regular basis, and that’s fair.

Harley spends most of the day just wandering around, reacquainting herself with the place. There’s a little more reconstruction going on than there was when she was still wreaking havoc here, but then she was never really the destroy-entire-city-block kind of girl, and there are way more destroy-entire-city-block kind of people lumbering around now.

(Back in her day, the biggest thing she ever blew up was a warehouse, and she did it uphill both ways, and she was grateful to blow up that warehouse. Or something.)

After nightfall, she breaks into an empty (or, well,  _ probably _ empty; either that or somebody’s got the most minimalist taste she’s ever seen in her life) apartment and changes. She made the costume over the course of one evening and way too much terrible coffee; the shorts are just regular shorts and the emblem is super crooked, but it’s recognizable. It’s good enough to start a conversation with, anyway. She can make a better one if it goes well.

Harley attaches the mask to her face, gives herself a little salute in the mirror, and leaves through the window.

Batman is a hard guy to find when you’re not causing any trouble, as it turns out. For a fraction of a second, she considers doing something harmless but noticeable, but she’s trying to make a  _ good _ impression this time, so that’s right out.

Only thing left to do is to try and find trouble that someone else is causing. It can’t be that hard, right?

\--

From a distance, it looked and sounded like a normal brawl; the cracked, flickering neon sign that simply read BAR with no further explanation did not lend itself to the idea that this was anything more. Perhaps the people are louder, angrier, but this is close enough to Blackgate that half of them are probably guards and the other half probably inmates. As much as Batman disapproves of the conduct of the former, this isn’t his hunt until civilians get caught in the crossfire, and none of the shouts are for help.

(But one of them is familiar.)

Batman frowns under his cowl, grapnels across the street, plants his boot on the edge of the building and looks down. Quinn had barely set foot in Gotham since she cut ties with Joker and (presumably) grown apart from Ivy; Batman hadn’t fully dissected her reasoning, assuming that she simply had nothing left to hold her there. She wasn’t from Gotham, and in his experience, that was the only reason that anyone would keep coming back when they had no reason to. It was his home, Jason’s, Tim’s, the Gordons’; it wasn’t Harley’s, so there was no sense in returning. Especially not since she’d made something of a bad impression while she was here.

But that was definitely her voice. The build matches, too; her fighting style is a little more efficient than it was in the old days when she would just let herself cartwheel directly into Batman’s gauntlets, but it still bears the distinctly…  _ elaborate _ pattern she prefers. She’s dyed her hair again, but not just in part or on one side; the whole length of it has been dyed a flat, unassuming black. If it weren’t for the rest of her appearance and behavior matching, he almost wouldn’t have recognized her; the only times he’s seen her hair at all, it’s been either blonde, mostly blonde with touches of whatever colors she’d felt like using that time, or (unimaginatively) red and black.

There is, however, the question of her clothing. Batman exhales slowly and heavily and forces himself to take stock of what his eyes are telling him.

She is, to her credit,  _ mostly _ covered, shorts notwithstanding; she’s not wearing body armor, but she’s not wearing a corset either. On that front, at least, he approves.

On every other front, and especially the front where the getup is suspiciously red and green with an even more suspiciously black and yellow cape and a downright damning “R” emblem attached crookedly to the shirt—that, he has a few questions about, and almost definitively a few problems with.

Batman drops out of the sky and lands almost soundlessly in the middle of the fray. Someone takes a wild swing at him; he swats it out of the way, and the person in question finally seems to connect the dots and starts running. The crowd dissipates within seconds—the parts of it that can still walk, at least. Batman crouches beside one of the ones who can’t, chest tight—

Battered, but conscious. Still alive.

“I didn’t kill anybody,” Harley says. “I mean, not today. I’ve killed people before, but you… knew that, and… um.”

Batman gets to his feet and looks down at her.

“Oh,” she says, glancing down at her costume as if seeing it for the first time. (Her domino mask appears to have been fashioned out of craft foam and a heat gun. He can still see the slight indentations of a ballpoint pen used to trace out an outline. None of her previous outfits suffered from a lack of attention to detail; this was a rush job. Why?)

“Quinn,” he says.

“Look,” Harley answers, “I  _ promise _ I can explain.”


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> EXPOSITION~

“I’m listening,” Batman says, in a tone of voice that implies the rest of the sentence goes  _ for the next ten seconds, so make it quick or I’ll jump to the worst conclusion I can think of in that timespan. _

“Okay,” Harley answers. “Look. I was gonna talk to you—”

He looks at her. His expression, or what she can see of it, somehow gets even more flat.

“—okay, so I wasn’t gonna just try to talk to you, but  _ only _ because it’s super hard to get your attention in a good way,” she grouses. “So really, this is your own fault.”

“Get to the point, Quinn,” Batman says. “What are you doing?”

Geez, he’s just as much of a hardass as he always was. Great. “Tryin’ to get your attention?”

“Consider it yours. What do you  _ want?” _

Harley stammers. “Wow, it’s really hard to say things when you’re staring like that, y’know? Super creepy. Not everything is an interrogation, y’know?” She pulls at her cape, fidgeting with the hem. It feels weird, but she kind of gets why the bats and the birds around here like them. Keeps the wind out, looks super cool when it doesn’t, and also gives you a conveniently portable place to hide when you’re being forcibly entered into a staredown with a six-foot-whatever guy with the friendliness and charm of a brick wall.

“I know,” he says impassively. “Let’s start again. You’re wearing a Robin costume. Why?”

“...’cause I thought you could use one?” Harley hazards. “I mean, y’know, the latest kid graduated from bird school, right? And I’ve seen you when you don’t have a sidekick and  _ wow _ is it… way scarier… than normal. Like you’re being right now, actually, now that I think about it.”

She has no idea what she said, but he softens his stance, just a little. “And you decided to come here to keep me company out of the goodness of your heart?” he asks, crossing his arms.

“Yyyes?” Harley tries. It doesn’t work. “ _ Ugh, _ fine, okay, sheesh.” She pinches the bridge of her nose, feels her mask try to come loose on one edge. “I kinda got caught up with… some stuff—”

“Task Force X,” Batman intones. “I’m familiar.”

“—course you are, why wouldn’t you be,” she mutters. “And look, I’m sure Waller’s  _ great _ when she stops it with the torture and the death threats, but I spent a lot of time trying to get out of places where I had to deal with torture and death threats, you know? And also she just kind of cost me all of my non-torture, non-death-threat friends, and I just thought… maybe…”

“You want out,” Batman says.

Harley nods vigorously. “You would not  _ believe _ how much I want out,” she says. “Kinda surprised nobody’s pulled the plug on me so far, actually. But that’s a good sign, right? Like, maybe they aren’t payin’ attention right now?”

“Maybe,” he agrees. He flicks something out of his utility belt. Harley’s a little too scared to ask what it is. “But this isn’t you coming to me to ask for help, Harley. Why the costume?”

“…got your attention?” she says. That doesn’t work either.

“There are easier ways to get my attention. You know about several of them.” Batman’s eyes skate down her costume again. He doesn’t appear any more pleased with it than he was the last time he did that. “Most of them don’t even involve midnight sewing sessions. Why this one?”

Harley crosses an arm over her stomach, playing with the seam of her sleeve on the opposite arm. “Can we do the interrogation thing in the car, at least?” she asks. “Not really a fan of gettin’ all emotional in front of a bunch of unconscious goons. Uh, anymore.”

Batman inclines his head. “Okay,” he says. “Then I just have one question first.”

“…uh-huh?”

He holds up the gadget. “Do you have anything in you,  _ apart _ from the bomb, that would disagree with an EMP?”

Harley blinks at it. It still doesn’t look like much. “Wait, does this mean you’re gonna—I mean, um. No? I don’t think so, anyway.” She tries a smile. “One way to find out, right?”

She thinks Batman’s probably raising an eyebrow at her but it’s impossible to tell with the cowl in the way. He doesn’t say anything, though; just takes a step forward and presses the side of the probably-an-EMP-thing to the back of her neck (exactly where she remembers the kill switch getting installed, and she doesn’t know if she  _ wants _ to know how he knows where it is without even asking). It’s cold and it makes her flinch a little bit, but that’s mostly because of the cold thing—okay, about 70-30 the cold thing vs. the it’s maybe going to throw off a failsafe in the bomb and straight-up kill her thing, but Batman wouldn’t be doing this if he wasn’t sure, right? It wouldn’t technically be  _ him _ killing her but if he found ways to blame himself for the whole Jason thing, he could probably find a way to blame himself for this too.

There’s a hum, sharp and too low for her hearing to exactly pick up. Every cell in her body shivers like she entered a hundred haunted houses at the same time, but it’s only a second, and her head doesn’t blow up. So that’s a start.

“I’ve deactivated it,” Batman says. “And the tracker it came with, at least for now. Come with me.” He turns, a leathery swoop of cape, and starts walking with purpose towards the apparently empty street. Two steps in, he thumbs something on his gauntlet; a couple of blocks away, Harley can just barely hear the familiar, angry snarl of a rocket-propelled engine roaring to life.

She can only keep up with him by jogging. “Hey,” she says, trying not to rub at the back of her neck and failing. “Hey, is this a yes? I thought you were gonna interrogate me more?”

“It’s a maybe,” Batman corrects her. “Whether it’s a yes or a no, I’m getting you out of the area before someone realizes this is where your signal cut off and they come looking for you.” The Batmobile thunders into view, narrowly missing two streetlamps and a trash can, and skids to a halt. Batman plants a hand on the chassis and begins his graceful vault into the driver’s seat before the roof is even finished pulling back to admit him. “Get in,” he orders.

“Right,” she says faintly, and starts circling around to the—

“ _ Front _ of the car, Quinn. You’re not under arrest this time.”

Oh. “Oh,” she says. “Right.” Awkwardly, she makes almost an entire circuit of the machine before clambering over the pulled-back would-be-a-door-if-this-wasn’t-a-freakin’-tank and slithering into the passenger seat. “Habit. Sorry.”

Batman looks dangerously close to smirking. “I’m sure,” he says. Harley is pretty sure that he’s not even fazed by any of this. He’s a really good actor, yeah, but… “Put your seatbelt on,” he adds, interrupting her attempted analysis of what his face is doing.

She’s also kind of used to the car basically pinning her in place like she’s on a rollercoaster. Awkwardly, she fumbles for the belt— _ belts, _ she realizes; and what is this, a freakin’ racetrack? It’s practically a whole harness—and figures out how it’s probably supposed to sit on her on about the fifth try. Batman just puts the car in gear and sets off down the street, and he would have told her if she’d fucked up the safety harness, right?

“So,” he says. “Start at the beginning. Why are you here?”

The link between her brain and her mouth got messed up a long time ago. “Well, I was born in—”

“Quinn.” He doesn’t take his eyes off the road, but she feels adequately glared at anyway. “Tell me what I  _ don’t _ know.”

Harley gives a nervous titter. “I mean, I guess that depends on how Big Brother you go on your old punching buddies,” she says. “But it’s, uh. I kinda went missing last month-slash-year-slash-whatever, and there was some spacetime bullshit, and everyone just sort of… forgot me.”

Batman gives an acknowledging hum and takes a turn way too fast. Harley tries not to squeak, fails, and then focuses on unwelding her fingers from the door knuckle by knuckle. “Everyone?” he echoes. “Your gang or your teammates?”

Little creepy that he knows that, but okay. “The gang,” she says. “Some of my teammates went through it too but it’s not like anyone cares about them in the first place, right? I mean, I guess someone does, but whatever.”

Batman ignores her. “Why not reassemble?” he asks. “Or start from scratch? This isn’t rock bottom for you, Harley. You didn’t come to me when it was.”

Harley wonders for a second what Batman thinks her rock bottom is, exactly. Partly because it might help her figure it out for herself, too. “I’m not really a start from scratch kind of girl,” she says. “And they all… I mean a bunch of them turned straight—not, like,  _ straight, _ but they just started doin’ other stuff. And it wouldn’t have been the same anyway, you know? I mean, they just…” She makes a hand gesture that even she doesn’t quite comprehend. “You know?”

“You’re upset they moved on?”

“No, I—” She wrinkles her nose. “I mean, maybe a  _ little. _ But I’m s’posed to be the psychoanalyse-y one here, Bats. C’mon.”

His mouth looks like it twitches, but it could just be a trick of the light. “I’m very sorry,” he says, not sounding particularly sorry at all. “Please, keep going.”

Harley drums her fingers on her kneecap and tries not to think about how fast they’re going. (Is it more or less terrifying being driven by Batman when she can actually see what’s going on? It’s hard to tell.) “I’m fine with them moving on,” she says. “I mean, I try real hard not to be a  _ monster. _ It’s just… I dunno. It’s not like they saw my corpse or anything and it might as well have been, right?”

Batman makes the  _ hmm _ noise again. “That explains why you’d be hurt,” he says. “It doesn’t explain why you made a Robin costume and came back to Gotham wearing it.”

“Technically, I wasn’t wearing it when I came back. I put it on  _ after _ I got here.”

He doesn’t say anything, but he does exhale a little harder than normal.

“I guess I just thought that… it’s not like that with you and the Robins, you know? Not that I was tryin’ to be you over there or anything, and most of my crew were more roommates than sidekicks, but…” Harley takes a breath. “I don’t wanna bring up any bad memories or anything here, but most of you guys have  _ actually _ died, and you still… the second they came back they were right back where they were.”

Batman’s throat moves as he swallows. “Not always,” he says.

“If they wanted to be,” she amends. “And sometimes it takes a while, I guess. But there’s always the option, right? Once you go Bat you never go back?”

“You want a safety net,” he says. The docks start zooming by.

Harley pulls a face. “Way to make me sound like a jerk about it,” she mutters. “I’m just… I’m sick of having to start over, okay?”

“There’s nothing wrong with that,” Batman says, takes another turn, and drives straight into the bay before Harley can so much as gasp.

Except he doesn’t, not quite, because there’s a  _ hole _ in the bay, the water parting like he’s Bat Moses or some shit and the Batmobile thunders into a narrow corridor and keeps going.

The ceiling closes. The lights come on, dotted strips on the corners where walls meet floor, illuminating the Batmobile in faint blue. She can’t verify it, obviously, but she gets the feeling that the hallway is shifting, the downward slope getting closer and closer to horizontal the longer they travel on it. This isn’t quite the most terrified she’s ever been but it’s definitely some sort of experience.

“It’s normal to want something to fall back on,” Batman continues as if a series of incredibly fucking weird events didn’t just happen all at once. “It’s human.”

“I’m pretty sure you aren’t,” she says weakly. Her fingers hurt. She’s pretty sure she’s bruised her knee from gripping it so hard.

That’s  _ definitely  _ a grin and it doesn’t make her feel any better. “You aren’t the first one to say that.”

Harley tries to remember what a normal pulse feels like. “This some sorta Batty hazing ritual?” she asks. “Or is it just for me?”

“Jason screamed,” Batman says, sounding entirely too cheerful for someone still speaking in a dead monotone.

The laugh bursts out of her more from nerves than from anything else. “You’re such a jerk,” she says. She’s absolutely sure she’s shaking a little.

“You aren’t the first to say that, either. Hold on; we’re almost there.”

Harley nods at first, then has the sudden suspicion that  _ hold on _ is an actual instruction and not just a turn of phrase. The inside of the Batmobile is just as sleek and hard to get a good hold of as the rest of it (apart from the very wide array of controls and stuff that she is  _ not _ touching), so she just sort of keeps a tight grip on her harness instead. “Almost where?” she asks.

“The Cave.”

She stares at him. He stares at the corridor. “So… that’s it? We’re good?”

“I’ll think about it,” he answers unhelpfully. “You’ve told me why you’d want to come here. You haven’t explained why you’d come here looking like a Robin.”

Harley blinks at him. “I kind of… did explain, though?”

The hallway starts sloping up, curving gently to the left, a huge lazy spiral. Like a parking garage, but creepier. “You know I don’t have a dress code, Harley. I won’t ask you to give up your identity just to work with me.”

Oh. That… honestly hadn’t quite occurred to her. She looks back towards the windshield. “Guess I thought it’d help?” she says. “I mean, y’know. Old supervillains come back into town all the time. I’m pretty sure you don’t sit them down for a nice little chat before carting them off back to the Asylum.”

“I would if they asked.” His voice is solemn enough that it doesn’t brook questioning.

Harley makes a sympathetic sound. “Guessin’ they don’t ask much, huh?”

“You’re not the first,” Batman says, but it’s in the kind of tone that implies that she’s pretty damn close. “But you  _ are _ the first to use that particular strategy.”

* * *

_ “Alfred. I’m coming in.” _

“I noticed, sir.”

_ “Harley Quinn is with me.” _

“…I see.”

_ “It’s fine, Alfred. But I will need you to do some surgery.” _

“I sincerely hope none of these statements are related.”

_ “It’s not for me.” _

“May I ask why?”

_ “She asked to join us.” _

“And you’re letting her.”

_ “I’m giving her a chance.” _

A heavy sigh. “As you wish, sir.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> shout-out to ProtoDan the Beta Man and to anyone who's reading this
> 
> I love you <3


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The Cave is… a lot.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I RETURN FROM DRAGONCON AND THE DCEU EXCHANGE AND ALSO JUST GETTING DISTRACTED FOR A WHILE

The Cave is… a lot.

The Batmobile runs almost silent from the inside (or maybe it just runs almost silent when it’s not being rocket-propelled into the most terrifying chase of all time); between that, the dim lighting, and the overall tightness of the driveway-slash-corridor-slash-secret-watery-entrance, Harley starts to feel almost claustrophobic. For what feels like a long time, the only break in the endless hallway is the occasional curve, a branching path merging into it—and then, all at once, it all just  _ opens. _ She cranes her neck to see out of the thick (rocket-proof, she can say from personal experience trying to shoot the damn thing) glass; she gets the faint impression of stalactites, of dark shapes that could be shadows or could be  _ actual literal bats _ hung scattered between them. Off to one side, a utilitarian spiral staircase circles up and out of sight. The surface beneath the Batmobile’s tires drops off into a sheer chasm, but at least there’s a string of stakes on either side of the road to make it a little less terrifying. And as huge as this cavern is just by itself, Harley knows it can’t possibly be all of it; she can see other entrances and exits, some of them probably other routes for the Batmobile and some of them too small for anything but a person. It feels… architecturally impossible, how big just this one chamber is, how whatever it’s underneath doesn’t just collapse—but then Batman’s probably planned for that, right? Reinforced it somehow?

He can’t possibly have built the whole thing himself, or even between him and the other people in this weird criminal-punching family. Right?

“Wow,” Harley breathes without making a conscious decision to speak. “Nice… garage?” What the hell does she even  _ call  _ this?

Batman looks amused as he drops the car into neutral and brings it to a surprisingly smooth stop. “Thanks,” he says as the Batmobile unfolds itself and he gets out.

Harley doesn’t bother trying not to gape as she stands up. The car is parked neatly in the exact middle of an enormous metallic circle (which, of course, has the enormous wings of his sigil stretching across it in a different material); she guesses, probably, that it revolves so he doesn’t have to pull an awkward turn just to get out of his own base. Given that it’s Batman, it probably also unfolds into an entire mechanic’s shop.

Off to the side, there’s another, smaller copy of the circle like an interlocking gear without the teeth. It’s empty, but its size—and the stylized R etched over its surface—makes it pretty easy to guess what normally goes there.

Come to think of it, it’s a little weird that every single Robin has gone the motorcycle route. Maybe they just don’t want to inflict the Bat family idea of driving on any passengers of their own.

“Follow me,” Batman says, as if there’s all that much of a choice when the place could just be a giant-ass maze for all Harley knows. “We’ll see about getting the explosives out of you.”

Hell yeah. Harley jogs a few steps to catch up with him, nearly steps on his cape, stumbles a little trying to right herself, and finally gets it together enough to match his pace. “I’m a little confused,” she says. “I woulda thought that if this was just some sorta trial run for me not being evil anymore, you’d take me to a backup Cave and leave the bomb in there and stuff, not… I mean, not that I’m  _ gonna  _ turn on you, but you’re not even a little worried that I’m gonna turn on you?”

“I plan on taking precautions against that,” he says easily, as if that’s not terrifying. “But not the kind of precautions that come with a literal killswitch, no matter who’s pulling the trigger.”

Okay, that makes a certain amount of sense, given… well, given him as a person. But. “So when you say  _ precautions…” _ she says. “What kind are we talking?”

“You don’t know who I am,” Batman says. “Until I’m satisfied that the knowledge won’t put either you or me in danger, I’m going to do my best to keep it that way. Past that…” He ascends a half-dozen steps. An enormous monitor flickers to life, then five or six smaller ones in rapid succession. Batman steps forward, flicking something open on his belt, extracting a tiny tube of something probably very detective-y from the pouch and slipping it into a slot in the desk.

The desk, which is also the computer, at least to Harley’s untrained eyes. She’s pretty sure she just solved the mystery of how the hell he keeps the Cave warm in the winter if that monster is  _ one machine.  _ She’s half expecting to turn around and see a server room carved out of the rock somewhere.

“I’m not interested in keeping you prisoner,” Batman says. Which really shouldn’t sound as intimidating as it actually does, given that he constantly goes out of his way to  _ not _ kill people, so ‘take no prisoners’ coming from him probably means something super different than it does coming out of anybody else. But hell, he’s still, like, at least twice the size of a regular human being and he’s got thematically appropriate body armor and she spent several years of her life having to deal with seeing him around every freakin’ corner like a magical teleporting gargoyle who punched people, and—

And this whole train of thought derailed itself a long time ago, she thinks.

“I mean, that’s nice?” she hazards. “But it doesn’t exactly tell me much about what you are gonna do with me, you know?”

His back is still turned, so she can’t tell if he’s actually smiling or not. But he does make a little  _ huh  _ sound like he’s maybe chuckling. “There are a lot more support systems in Gotham for ex-Arkham and Blackgate inmates than there were when you left,” he says. “I can pull a few strings, find you a day job and somewhere to stay.”

“And paint a  _ shoot me  _ sign on my back for everybody I ever screwed over when I was here last time?” Harley asks, voice rising in incredulity. “I got into enough trouble back at the last place I lived for what I did here. And also what I did there, but that part just made sense. I’m pretty sure I’d be safer gettin’ locked in the Batcloset somewhere is all.”

“A different identity can be arranged if it would make you feel safer,” Batman says, as calmly as if she hadn’t spoken at all. “Think of it as witness protection.”

“Yeah,” Harley says, half under her breath. “I’m sure  _ the Joker was an asshole  _ is a super valuable piece of witnessing.”

Batman half-turns, gives her a brief look. “It isn’t about how new the information is,” he says. “It’s about whether you can help in the first place, and whether trying to help will put you in danger. And you are planning on helping me.”

Which is pretty different from planning on helping law enforcement in general, considering how just as much of the GCPD hated Bats as liked him half the time, but mentioning that comes just a little closer to self-sabotage than she wants to go most of the time. “If you say so,” she says skeptically. “Do I at least get to pick out the name?”

Batman hesitates. “Within reason,” he says.

_ Damn. _

* * *

After Batman is finished doing whatever it is he was doing to the computer, which she’s sure was all very important and investigative and not even remotely just to look busy and cool, he gestures for Harley to follow him again. Off to the side of the computer is a path that’s a bit wider than the others, leading towards a hallway that’s so perfectly squared off and straight that whatever natural structure it had is completely invisible now; there’s a slow ramp up, and then a turn, and another slow ramp, and that’s about the point where she gives up on ever knowing how big the Cave really is. It just probably extends beneath the whole of Gotham and the sooner she comes to terms with that, the happier she’ll probably be.

They turn a corner and there’s just… honestly, what looks like a fully functioning—if a little more sinister, just from the very battlefield-medicine feel of its gray stone walls and lack of any adjoining… anything—hospital room. Emergency room? Operating room? All of the above?

There are two beds in it, one pushed up (or bolted down to) the wall and one smack dab in the middle of the place. It’s better lit than any room she ever expected to see Batman walk into, and every available vertical surface is covered in cabinets and counters and under-the-counter cabinetry and a sink, and there’s someone else already in there. He’s tall (but not as tall as Batman) and old (but in a scary military grandpa kind of way) and the lower half of his face is covered in a surgical mask (which doesn’t help the “scary” part) but the upper half is… totally unremarkable. She’s pretty sure she’s maybe seen him somewhere before, but maybe it’s just one of those faces; and recognizing people is just one of those things that got a little teensy bit harder after her time with the Joker. Prosopagnosia ain’t exactly the most  _ interesting  _ side effect of that whole stupid time in her life, especially since she has no idea when it actually started or which of the bajillion blows to the head or dunks in a chemical bath was the one that knocked that particular screw loose; but it’s definitely one of the more inconvenient ones.

Hell, her social circle is usually like five people and twenty animals, and the people have the decency to dress up in super identifiable ways. That itchy little  _ I know this guy  _ feeling is probably just her default because she doesn’t get out much.

(It might not be his face, though. She’s… she’s pretty sure she’s maybe seen this guy before, or the way he holds himself, or…)

“Doctor Quinzel,” he says archly, or maybe  _ arch  _ is the only thing his voice does. His accent is intimidating in the way that a museum display is, and it makes her want to run outside and smash something out of sheer formless panic just as much.

“I, uh,” she says. “I dunno if I’m actually a doctor anymore, but, um. Hi. Hello?” Something dies in her throat. It might be part of her soul. “Sir?” she guesses.

The quirk of that single eyebrow could topple a government. “Hello,” he returns smoothly, and somehow manages to make it sound like she’s stepped out of line. (Who the hell  _ is  _ this guy and what the hell did he do to get this… this… to get like this?) He turns his gaze to Batman, who appears unfazed. “I’ve prepared the room as much as I could, sir. What exactly do you need me to do?”

Okay, so that’s Alfred. That… should probably feel either more or less like a revelation than it is. It should also probably not make her feel even  _ more  _ like she’s run into this guy before at some point and just can’t remember.

“There’s an explosive embedded at the base of Harley’s skull,” Batman says, tapping a hologram into life on his gauntlet because  _ that’s  _ reasonable. It fuzzes once, then coagulates into a slowly rotating image of a transparent head (presumably hers) with transparent muscles and opaque arteries and bones (presumably also hers). There’s a helpful little white circle around a worrisome blotch, highlighted red, just where the side of her topmost vertebra meets the rounded swoop of the occipital bone. “Just here. I’ve deactivated it for now, but it isn’t a permanent solution.”

“Barbaric,” Alfred murmurs under his breath, peering more closely at the hologram.

She likes him a little more, but not in a way where she’s exactly comfortable sitting around in here with him yet.

“The people who put it there have never been particularly ethical,” Batman says, and he sounds cold enough about it that she honestly wonders how many run-ins he’s had with them. Hell, it makes her wonder if he’s ever tried to stage any rescues.

Wouldn’t that have been funny, having Batman show up for her, but… like… as a victim and not as a perpetrator. Although, come to think of it, he always did treat her differently than the Joker when he was going after them. Part of her had always kinda figured maybe it was because she was a girl, but he never held back when it was her and  _ Pam, _ so… maybe that’s kind of what he was trying to do the whole time.

(And she knows she was in way too fucking deep to have been pulled out by somebody she viewed as an enemy for so long, but it kind of really hurts to speculate if he would have taken her in from the beginning if she’d just come to her senses for long enough to want it. If she could have  _ not  _ suffered all of the extra injuries, the poisonings, the trauma; if she could have been in a position where Waller wouldn’t have looked at her twice in the first place, let alone have permission to utilize her; if she could have—)

Woulda, coulda, shoulda. Not the point anymore.

Alfred looks at her, a little less coldly now. “If you could get on the table for me, I’ll get some localized anesthetic ready.”

Harley rubs the back of her neck nervously. “Yeah, uh,” she says. “About that. I don’t think it’s gonna work exactly.”

Batman glances up. “You’re resistant to toxins,” he says, the realization dawning.

“Comes with the territory of, uh. The last couple of people I ran around with,” she says almost sheepishly. “Normally I’d call it an upside, but let’s just say it’s a  _ really  _ good thing I don’t get cavities easy, you know?” Harley chuckles nervously. No one else does.

Alfred glances at Batman, then back to her. “I’ll see what I can do,” he says. “Please sit down, Doctor Quinzel.”

She sits down. It would be kinda hard not to even if he weren’t being so gentle and polite about it, she thinks; he just… doesn’t seem like the kind of guy that people don’t listen to. Not in a scary way, but in a way where you don’t even really think about it, where  _ not  _ listening to him doesn’t even feel like an option that’s available at the time.

“I mean, my pain tolerance is pretty high,” she says. “I just didn’t want you wastin’ stuff on me, is all.”

“It isn’t a waste if it helps,” he answers sternly, circling around behind her. She vaguely hears him going through the cabinets, but she doesn’t turn to look; it’s probably better if she doesn’t know what he’s grabbing, right? “Or even if it might.”

Harley has no idea how to respond to that, so she just kind of nods.

“Hold still,” Alfred says. “I’ll be as quick as I can.”

Harley titters, drumming her fingertips on her knee as she feels a needle pressing in on the back of her neck. “Just don’t be so quick that you get me all paralyzed and stuff,” she says.

“Of course not.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 1\. ProtoDan remains awesome  
> 2\. you can pry my face blindness headcanons about Harley from my cold dead hands

**Author's Note:**

> thanks as always to ProtoDan <3


End file.
